-Bill and Jane from My Parents Were Awesome

-Thoughts on thank you notes. (via Swiss Miss)

-Jason Kottke’s take on the FCC ruling for bloggers –see the footnotes for the post — are exactly what I’ve been thinking. (And congrats to True Ventures and Jen Bekman! Smashing.)

- Designer Erin Jang’s very sweet subway map made according to the interests of her three-year-old nephew. What a lovely gift. I originally thought Jason made this, but it turns out he just found it, and so.. (via Kottke)

Jason posted this link to a list of phobias. I lost about half an hour to it. There’s a fear for everything (panophobia). I’ve categorized a few of the better ones.

Fears that amuse me:

• peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth (arachibutyrophobia)
• fear of Bolesheviks (boleshephobia)
• fear of the pope (papaphobia)

Fears that make a lot of sense:

• being severely beaten by a rod (rhabdophobia)
• rape (virginitiphobia
• pain (odynophobia)

Fears that have applied to me at one time or another:

• dark (nyctophobia)
• injections (trypanophobia)
• oral surgery (odontophobia).

What-the-hell fears:

• chins (geniophobia)
• flutes (aulophobia)
• objects on the right side of the body (dextrophobia)

Sucks-to-be-you fears:

• music (melophobia)
• poetry (metrophobia)
• wines (oenophobia)
• kissing (pilemaphobia)
• falling in love (philophobia)

Good-luck-with-that fears:

• time (chronophobia)
• thinking (phronemophobia)
• gravity (barophobia)

But my favorite fear of all time is hippopotomonstrososesquipedaliophobia. Fear of long words.

3:25 p.m.

While I’m away, you should visit Jason Kottke. His site isn’t exactly dedicated to raw personal emotion, and that’s a good thing because I think there�s some very dark, Mansonesque stuff just under the surface. (I have it on good authority that he Photoshops out the swastika carved into his forehead.) But every once in awhile he says things like “Ricky Martin. I don’t get it,” and you get a little piece of his personality tucked in among the mini movie reviews:

“You know, I’m all for personal expression, but having an air
freshener shaped like a pot leaf hanging from your rear view
mirror pretty much assures that your car is going to get tossed
by the police if you’re stopped for a moving violation.”

“Do you know why an em dash (-) is so named? The “em” is a
unit of length…in typographic lingo, an em is the width of a
capital M in a typeface.”

“So, when did the whole share-a-penny thing at the local gas
station become an industry? I would imagine that a long time
ago, somebody came up with an idea to put a little cup by the
register so that people could drop their pennies in there for other
customers to utilize when they were short a couple cents. Other
people adopted the idea and now there’s a share-a-penny cup at
pretty much every gas station one goes to. In fact, the
share-a-penny idea has advanced to the point where there are
specialized cups made especially for placement on station
counters.

Let’s stop to think about this for a minute. This means that
somewhere there’s a machine (or possibly a whole factory of
machines) punching out these custom penny cups. There are
engineers designing bigger and better share-a-penny cups.
Teams of marketing people are trying to build share-a-penny
mindshare in the heads of gas station owners. Share-a-penny
cup salespeople are out there going gas station door to gas
station door selling their product. An army of delivery trucks are
delivering these cups around the globe.

Does this seem odd to anyone else?”

“The crap week from hell continues. I fell asleep whilst reading my
book in a mall food court over my lunch hour and got rousted by
a police officer who told me to wake up and move along. I don’t
look that much like a vagrant, do I?

Fuck the Police.”

“The most perfect thing happened to me this morning. I’m walking
down the stairs towards my front door. I stop to look out the
little window in the door to see how bad it is raining out. Just
then, this girl comes into my frame of vision from the left.
Suddenly, she stops short and goes back to take another look at
the back of my car…specifically the “kids love satan” bumper
sticker. She looks and then continues on, laughing.”

prerecorded